Sigfried Bethke

Siegfried Bethke studied at Heidelberg University in Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate in 1983 and his habilitation in 1987. In 1987/88 he spent a research stay at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a Feodor Lynen fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Subsequently, he did research at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, as a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation. In 1993 he was appointed Professor of Experimental Physics at the RWTH Aachen University, where he held a chair at the III Physics Institute until 1999. In 1999 he became a "Scientific Member" and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, where he was Managing Director from 2000 to 2005.[2]

Bethke's research focuses on the investigation of high-energy particle collisions at particle accelerators and the development of particle detectors to detect these collisions. Bethke is a member of the OPAL collaboration at CERN's LEP storage ring. He is the Director responsible for the activities of the Max Planck Institut for Physics within the ATLAS collaboration at CERN's LHC. Furthermore, Bethke contributes to the experimental testing of quantum chromodynamics and to experimental astroparticle physics.[2]